The Eisenhower Way: 1952-1961; How Ike can once again save the Country
By Dr. John C. Hulsman
“Ideologues are people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the centre.”
“Those who take the extreme positions in American political and economic life are always wrong.”
--President Dwight David Eisenhower
President Dwight David Eisenhower’s thinking saved his world; curiously enough, it can also save ours.
During his own lifetime, Dwight David Eisenhower was at the same time the most famous and popular man in the world, while all the while remaining almost entirely personally unknowable. His many job titles and nicknames uncannily point out this curious paradox: ‘Ike,’ ‘The Hero of Normandy,’ ‘The Liberator of Europe,’ ‘The Boss,’ and finally, simply, ‘The President.’ The Olympian titles took Eisenhower out of the realm of the living, making him more symbol than man.
But while always being enormously popular, and with the whole of America behind him in what amounted to a twenty-year love affair (he was voted Gallup’s ‘Most Admired Man of the Year’ twelve times, still more than anyone else), almost no one knew what was behind the affable grin, the optimistic aura of easy command, and the resonant, authoritative voice that resembled nothing so much as Clark Gable’s. Upon his death his wife Mamie was asked who knew her husband best. She cannily replied, ‘No one.’
This dual trait of being utterly recognisable and yet enigmatically unknowable initially did not serve Eisenhower’s memory well. Just after his eight-year tenure in the White House came to an end—when Eisenhower, who was the oldest president ever at the time (70) was succeeded by the glamourous youngest elected president (JFK, at 43)--historians ranked him in the bottom third of all Chief Executives, about level with the forgettable Chester Arthur.
In the early sixties, at the height of youth-worshipping Camelot, the former president was seen as an amiable, do-nothing duffer, a man who did not let running the country get in the way of his golf game (this despite the fact that JFK played golf more often and better than Ike did). The 1950s came to be seen as a time of stagnation, an era when early chances for advances in Civil Rights and the search for an accommodation with the Soviet Union were squandered. Eisenhower’s administration was initially viewed by many, generally left-leaning, historians as a wasted opportunity.
With the passage of time, this early, almost entirely incorrect, historical caricature of Eisenhower as having turned the White House into ‘The Tomb of the Well-known Soldier’ has been dramatically replaced by a new consensus of an administration and a man who skilfully steered the country through the early shoals of the Cold War, inaugurating an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Eisenhower has correspondingly shot up the presidential charts, and is now viewed by a majority of historians as a successful, underrated, chief executive. That is as it should be, but it is not nearly enough.
For the successful decade that Eisenhower bequeathed to the nation was not the result of luck, or even merely tactical adroitness. Behind the ‘hidden hand presidency,’ as Eisenhower’s behind-the-scenes style came to be known, lurked coherent precepts, thinking, policies and ideals, essential inputs that drove the highly favourable outcome that was America in the 1950s. This ‘Eisenhower Way’ has remained forgotten, just as the real man behind the grin has so often eluded the grasp of a series of first-rate biographers. It is the Eisenhower presidency in the form of intellectual biography that is necessary to really complete the picture of this entirely known, but heretofore unknowable, man.
Lurking beneath his highly appealing façade, Eisenhower was also an unlikely first-rate thinker, one whose innovative foreign and domestic policies did nothing less than to set the United States on course for victory in the Cold War, ushering in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. This article amounts to a committed effort to rediscover this misunderstood giant, rescuing him from an undeserved intellectual obscurity, as his brilliant foreign and domestic policy must be studied and adopted by the United States today if we are to save our world and our country, as Eisenhower so cleverly rescued his.
The worldwide fame that came from being the face of the US war effort in Europe, successfully managing alliance relations in the service of the defeat of Nazism, made Ike the best-known man in the world, setting the stage for his two-term presidency. Perhaps even more importantly, the unique intellectual education he received from his three mentors in the 1930s-1940s (Generals Fox Conner, Douglas MacArthur, and George C. Marshall) coalesced into a very distinct set of precepts, ‘The Eisenhower Way,’ which were to guide his highly successful years in the White House, when the US was at the historical zenith of its power and prosperity.
‘The Eisenhower Way,’ is the embodiment of the virtues he exemplified, the principles he stood for, and most of all the intellectual precepts that drove his highly underrated presidency. For Dwight David Eisenhower’s way of thinking is needed in today’s America, now more than ever.
1952: Eisenhower rescues the Republican Party and Secures Victory in the Cold War.
Perhaps the key moment in the long Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union was the 1952 Republican presidential election, where an initially reluctant Eisenhower was induced by a grassroots movement (and influential Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts) to run for and ultimately win the Republican presidential nomination, one of the most consequential yet obscure political events of the Twentieth Century.
Rarely has a party nomination contest been fraught with such importance. For in snatching the Republican nomination from expected winner, ‘Mr. Republican,’ the isolationist Senator Robert Taft of Ohio (Ike only announced he was a Republican in 1952), Eisenhower successfully remade the GOP in his image over foreign policy issues, giving new life to a party that had lost the previous five races for the presidency. In winning, Eisenhower was seeing off his party’s ‘Old Guard,’ with its twin-headed hydra of unilateralist and isolationist impulses.
President Truman had earlier made the centrist Containment Doctrine the primary strategic concept defining the brewing American rivalry with the Soviet Union—the US would politically compete with the USSR, all the while eschewing the far-right Rollback Doctrine of direct military conflict, as well as far-left efforts to appease Stalin’s adventurism.
In prevailing over his extremist foes—General Douglas MacArthur on the right and former Vice-President Henry Wallace on the left--the Truman White House had temporarily secured Containment as the keystone of America’s Cold War foreign policy. Instead of either accommodation or war, political competition with the Soviets was to be the modus operandi of the Truman years. But this fragile, temporary intellectual and political victory would have amounted to nothing, if the Republican Party had not also come to adopt Containment thinking as its very own.
While in the immediate post-war period, Eisenhower had been remarkably dovish towards his wartime allies, the Soviets (he and Russian Marshall Georgy Zhukov became good friends), by mid-1947—following the rise in East-West tensions over economic recovery in Germany and the Greek Civil War--Eisenhower came to agree with President Truman’s Containment policy to stop Soviet aggression.
By politically vanquishing the isolationist Taft (and then early in his term prevailing over restive bureaucratic forces in his own administration through the 1953 Project Solarium War Game exercise), Eisenhower made all the difference, cementing Containment Doctrine as the foreign policy strategy of both major American political parties throughout the long Cold War to come. The bipartisan nature of the support for Containment allowed the strategy to survive the coming myriad changes in US political fortunes, acquiring a continuity rarely seen in any Great Power’s foreign policy. It is the miraculous political staying power of Containment that led America to eventual victory in the Cold War. This remarkable foreign policy intellectual durability would simply not have come about without Eisenhower’s pivotal victory over Taft in the 1952 primary.
1953: Korea; The Essential Need for Limited War.
It was in Eisenhower’s practical policy success in ending the Korean War that his earlier efforts to chart a middle road over foreign policy came to fruition. Disdaining the pleas of both his former mentor General MacArthur that America had to escalate the war (through the dropping of 30-50 atomic bombs on Manchuria) to re-claim North Korean territory via Rollback, as well as far-left appeasers who felt the US had no need to stand up to communist aggression in the first place, Eisenhower predictably charted a middle course.
MacArthur had famously proclaimed that ‘In war there can be no substitute for victory.’ In favouring the far more restrained policy of limited war, Eisenhower was to answer, ‘Yes, there is. The substitute is holding the line and preventing the enemy from winning.’ Eisenhower’s successful ending of the Korean War and the dawning of the nuclear age made it clear that the United States no longer lived in the World War II era of all-or-nothing certainties. It was the very changed nature of this new age that made it clear that the president’s advocacy of limited war made eminent sense, even as the new world left former giants such as MacArthur intellectually behind.
In late 1952, the president-elect visited Korea, to get a first-hand feel for the situation. Eisenhower had campaigned on the nebulous promise that he would ‘go to Korea,’ implicitly reassuring the American people that the military stalemate that had developed there over the past two years would be brought to a quick end. Given the ideological stakes at play, it was absolutely vital that Ike end the Korean War on politically successful terms, if his centrist Containment Doctrine was to gain traction and permanence with the American people.
Chairman Mao was quick to test the resolve of the new president. As Eisenhower came to power, Mao’s Chinese communist army in North Korea began a military build-up in the Kaesong sanctuary. But Eisenhower was not to be bullied; he bluntly threatened Mao with the use of nuclear weapons if an armistice was not quickly concluded.
At this critical juncture, the new administration caught a strategic break. With the death of Stalin in March 1953, Russian support for Mao’s hard-line position over the Korean War evaporated as it turned inwards to its brewing internal political battle over who would succeed the Soviet dictator. With his ally heading for the door, Mao decided to compromise with the US over the outstanding issue of returning prisoners of war, the ostensible reason that peace talks had gone nowhere. With this diplomatic breakthrough, the Korean armistice was dramatically concluded in July 1953, just six months into Eisenhower’s term.
President Eisenhower’s success in making limited war an American precept can be seen in the final terms: Korea was demarcated into North and South along the 38th parallel, very near to the original geographical boundaries between the two countries that had prevailed before the North’s invasion of the South in 1950. In an implicit repudiation of the left’s advocacy of appeasing Stalin, Eisenhower had successfully stood up to Communist aggression, safeguarding South Korea. In a similar rejection of of the right’s advocacy of Rollback Doctrine, Ike had not continued an unpopular war in the vain and immeasurably dangerous hopes of conquering North Korea through the use of atomic weapons.
Ironically, by threatening the then recalcitrant Chinese with the draconian option of nuclear annihilation, Eisenhower had broken the diplomatic logjam, securing the successful end of the war, and at the same time paradoxically buttressing the argument for a general limited war strategy that perfectly corresponded with his support for the centrist Containment Doctrine. Eisenhower’s successful armistice initiative in Korea led to the US belief in the new-fangled doctrine of limited war; that military clashes between the American-led and Communist worlds must be restrained in the short run, giving time for the Containment Doctrine to work in the long run.
Eisenhower’s overall strategic goals were to avoid war, contain Communism, and preserve the booming US economy. The Eisenhower administration is a tale of both what it did and what it did not do; to its everlasting credit, it did not turn the Korean War into a World War. By seeing to it that military brushfires not get out of hand, Ike had made the very dangerous early Cold War era a great deal safer.
1954: Support for the Principle of Anti-colonialism; Avoiding Disaster over Dien Bien Phu.
Early in 1953, Paris asked Eisenhower for support in battling the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese Communists attempting to throw their French colonial rulers out of their country. Suspicious of both French and Viet Minh motives, and determined not to be drawn into a protracted colonial war, the president dispatched Lieutenant General John W. ‘Iron Mike’ O’Daniel to Vietnam to assess both the political situation, as well as the quality of French forces there.
Further to O’Daniel’s gloomy report, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Matthew Ridgeway, dissuaded Eisenhower from militarily intervening on behalf of the French, presenting a comprehensive list of what a successful invasion would entail, meaning a massive American military deployment. Prophetically, President Eisenhower stated, ‘the war (in Vietnam) would absorb our troops by divisions,’ and was not worth the perilous risk.
While the administration did provide Paris with bombers and non-combat personnel, the president was determined to limit American involvement in aiding the French, partly due to the exorbitant estimated cost to the US in terms of economic wherewithal and lives, but also due to the terrible public relations and moral example supporting a colonial power would relay to the rest of the world.
As Cold War tensions increased, Eisenhower—even at the height of American global power--was acutely aware that his era was not one of unipolarity, where the world was ruled by merely one Great Power. Even beyond the obvious bipolar structure of the Cold War, where the US and the USSR vied for global dominance, the president was entirely cognisant that a non-aligned developing world, countries beyond the direct control of either Washington or Moscow, amounted to a third global force. As such, standing as the most powerful of the anti-colonial powers amounted to an asset of incalculable value for the US.
For the US to decisively side with France in Vietnam, tipping the military balance in favour of the old, dying colonial order against national liberation movements across the globe, would unnecessarily make an enemy of much of the world, amounting to a cataclysmic public relations defeat for the United States and a windfall for its Soviet enemies. As a country which itself had come into being through an anti-colonial struggle against Great Britain, America risked ceding vast swathes of international credibility in the Developing World, all for highly marginal gains in Vietnam.
Once again, Eisenhower used the devious tactics of the ‘hidden hand presidency’ to further American interests with both the French as well as the anti-colonial developing world. Further French requests for military assistance from the US were agreed, but only on conditions the president knew would be impossible to realise, involving joint western action agreed in advance and for congressional approval of the sales. Diplomatically, Eisenhower managed to avoid saying ‘no’ to the French, while at the same time not unduly hurting America’s reputation with the Developing World. For the president understood that moral authority, was not just a phrase for the weak; world opinion matters a great deal to practical American strategic power.
Finally, when the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu was abut to be overrun by the Viet Minh in May 1954, Eisenhower steadfastly refused to militarily come to its rescue, despite urgings from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Vice-President Nixon that America support the French with a huge airstrike. However, in moves that would come back to haunt America, Eisenhower offered military and economic aid to the new Republic of South Vietnam, the pro-Western state that emerged from the Geneva talks that ended French rule in the country.
Fatefully, in February 1955, Eisenhower dispatched the first American soldiers to Vietnam, serving as military advisers training the new South Vietnamese army. The commitment would grow to some 900 men by the end of Eisenhower’s presidency. While Eisenhower was not the primary author of the Vietnam disaster for the US (that dubious honour must go jointly to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson), his half-in, half-out strategy in Southeast Asia was a fateful beginning to the catastrophic Vietnam War, one which severely tarnished America’s standing in the Developing World.
However, on its own, the Dien Bien Phu saga stands as a positive example of Eisenhower managing to maintain America’s close allied relationship with a great European power (in this case, France), all the while he steered a broadly anti-colonial course, one which mattered in the increasingly important Developing World. In 1956, over the Suez Crisis—where Great Britain, France, and Israel tried to subvert Developing World leader Gamal Abd el-Nasser of Egypt by militarily seizing the recently nationalised Suez Canal—Eisenhower came down even more strongly on the side of the anti-colonialists, thereby securing America’s position in much of the world that desired neither Soviet nor American primacy. Decades ahead of his time, Eisenhower presciently saw that international relations is more than trans-Atlantic relations.
1955: Support for the Principle of Anti-interventionism; Avoiding Disaster over Quemoy and Matsu.
Having just skilfully ended the Korean stalemate, in late 1954 Eisenhower was confronted by another military crisis with Communist China, as he strove mightily to avoid another war.
The tiny (and strategically unimportant) islands of Quemoy and Matsu were Chinese Nationalist strongholds just off the coast of rival mainland Communist China. America had committed itself to defending the Chinese nationalist cause, centred in Formosa. In September 1954, as Mao’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) began shelling the two islands, American hawks demanded that President Eisenhower intervene against the Communist mainland, as Nationalist territory was now under attack.
By the close of the year, Eisenhower’s military and foreign policy experts at the National Security Council (NSC), The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department had unanimously recommended to the president on no less than five occasions that he use nuclear weapons if necessary to defend Quemoy and Matsu. Thankfully, the level-headed Eisenhower refused to do so.
Once again, he used vague tactics in the support of a clear strategic line against military interventionism. The president refused to be drawn on what sort of attack on Quemoy and Matsu would lead to US counter-retaliation, retaining for himself maximum freedom of manoeuvre.
While Eisenhower refused to give into the American hawks’ calls for military intervention, at the same time he made it clear to Mao that the Chinese shelling could not continue, if he was to steer the US clear of war. The President staged military manoeuvers off the coast of China, tested advanced nuclear weapons in Nevada, musing aloud that he saw no reason why nuclear weapons should not be used in furthering American strategic goals in the world, a public view dramatically at odds with his extensive private misgivings.
Ike’s bluff with Mao worked; within weeks Communist China stopped shelling the islands and within months the crisis subsided in early 1955. In again charting a moderate diplomatic path—disdaining the hawks’ call for war, while at the same time standing up to Mao’s aggression—Eisenhower had averted an utterly unnecessary conflict, keeping America out of war. Over Quemoy and Matsu, just as he had earlier disdained bailing the French out of their calamity at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, Eisenhower had championed the cause of anti-interventionism, prudently avoiding war except as a diplomatic tool of last resort. Better still, Eisenhower managed to confront Communism, all the while securing peace.
1956: A Third Way for Government; The Interstate Highway System. If Eisenhower’s main foreign policy goal was to contain the spread of Communism, the primary domestic aim of his administration was to tame the deficits that had been a staple of the Roosevelt/Truman years, attempting to once again balance the federal budget. Given the world we now live in, with both Democrats and Republicans resolutely free spenders--contemporary Democrats run screaming from the room if entitlement reform is even whispered while today’s Republicans never met a tax cut they didn’t like—Eisenhower’s budgetary precepts are as out of fashion as they are desperately necessary to re-learn.
First, the Eisenhower administration tacitly accepted the political revolution of the Roosevelt era; if over Containment Doctrine he had reached a foreign policy consensus with the mainstream of the Democratic Party, he also managed to come to a centrist domestic consensus for his time as well. Eisenhower continued on with FDR’s New Deal, even expanding the scope of Social Security in 1956. In general, the Eisenhower White House sought to slow or contain the growth of most New Deal programmes, though significantly he did not attempt to repeal them outright. The social safety net that FDR had put in place—and with it the concomitant increase in the role of government in Americans’ lives—was not questioned, let alone undone.
Second, the Eisenhower team was not averse to spending money, particularly on large national public works programmes needed to upgrade the country’s infrastructure, seeing this as investing in future economic prosperity. In June 1956, the Interstate Highway System was inaugurated, the largest single government-sponsored public works programme ever devised. Along with the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Eisenhower White House made it clear that federal spending and ambitious federal programmes were necessary for the continued health of the American body politic.
President Eisenhower managed to get the massive infrastructure funding from Congress, justifying the expense as a national security measure, as he modelled the project on the sleek autobahns he had seen in Germany after the war, highways that had greatly aided the Nazi war effort. However, the president always saw the great economic multiplier national highways would amount to for America, as the roads literally became the arteries of American capitalism for several generations.
Third, however, the Eisenhower administration—despite both Cold War pressures and the need for national infrastructure—managed to keep a tight lid on federal spending. During his eight years in the White House, the president balanced the federal budget three times, a record of fiscal discipline unsurpassed since the dawning of the modern presidency. Calling himself a ‘progressive conservative’ and his programme ‘dynamic conservatism,’ Eisenhower was a Republican who slashed military budgets, opposed tax cuts, resisted Communism without going to war, and supported Social Security. Such heresies should be encouraged again in both parties, if centrism is to regain its vital role in American political life.
For Eisenhower, rightly, fiscal prudence was a moral issue. “We must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss of their political and spiritual heritage.” Such sound stewardship, while a deeply unfashionable virtue today, is a major component of ‘The Eisenhower Way.’ It deserves to be unearthed again, if an increasingly decadent America is to save itself from itself.
1957: The Primacy of Constitutionalism; Securing Civil Rights at Little Rock.
In 1954, in a unanimous 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court, in Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, had decreed that all American public schools must be desegregated in the interests of fairness and according to the tenets of the Constitution. Seeing that many states, particularly in the South, were not adhering to its landmark decision, the Court, on May 3, 1955, in Brown II, ordered that all public schools must be integrated, “with all deliberate speed.” The stage was set for the greatest domestic crisis of the Eisenhower presidency.
As the gradualist that he was, and by his lack of a full-throated defence for the logic of the Supreme Court decisions, President Eisenhower made it tacitly clear that he had sympathy for White Southern antipathy to the ruling, feeling it was socially too much change all at once and that desegregation should have proceeded in stages.
However, time and again, the president explicitly made clear that he would wholeheartedly uphold the law, as he had sworn to do in his presidential Oath of Office. So while Eisenhower’s critics are right in that he did not take moral leadership on the Civil Rights issue, he certainly did so over the notion that Constitutionalism must always and forever govern the conduct of the president. As President Eisenhower made abundantly clear, “If the day comes when we only obey Court decisions we approve of, the end of the American system will not be far off.”
This is not to imply that the president was indifferent to the plight of Blacks in 1950s America. President Truman had begun the process of desegregating the armed forces in 1948, but the actual implementation had been glacial. Eisenhower made his stance clear in his first State of the Union Address in February 1953, “I propose to use whatever authority resides in the office of the president to end segregation…in the Armed Forces.” Eisenhower went further, declaring that racial discrimination was a national security issue, as Communists around the world used its existence in American as a means for endless propaganda attacks. Just prior to the Little Rock crisis, on September 9, 1957, the president signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (relating to voting rights), the first Federal Civil Rights Bill passed since Reconstruction.
Still, Southern segregationists, perhaps lulled into a false sense of security given the president’s limited personal endorsement of the Brown decision, fatally misread the man and his unswerving commitment to the Constitution. The Civil Rights struggle came to a head in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the state had in 1957 refused to honour the Brown decision. The segregationist Governor, Orval Faubus, ordered the state National Guard to prevent nine enrolled Black children from entering Little Rock Central High, heretofore an all-white public school. An incensed White mob and the National Guard of a state of the Union stood between the children and their Constitutional Rights. Eisenhower, despite hating the position the grandstanding Faubus had placed him in, resolved to act.
As the crisis escalated in September 1957, the president invited Faubus to his golfing holiday retreat in Newport, Rhode Island, to privately discuss what to do. During the course of a twenty-minute conversation, Ike thought he had diffused the crisis, and that Governor Faubus would acquiesce in the enrolment of the Black students.
However, Eisenhower had been duped. Instead, Faubus sent the Arkansas National Guard home, leaving only the local, pro-segregationist police standing between the kids and the White mob, who set upon the children. Despite later saying he felt heartbroken at deploying American army troops in an American city, President Eisenhower never hesitated in upholding the Constitution. Decisively, the president placed the recalcitrant Arkansas National Guard under direct Federal Control and sent the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students to Little Rock High School. The crisis passed, as the Constitution and the Civil Rights victory were upheld; Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote to thank the president for his unswerving stand.
In 1944, Eisenhower had sent the elite 101st Airborne Division into battle against the Nazis in Normandy; now he called upon them to police the streets of Little Rock, so nine black children could go to school and the Constitution be vindicated. Later, when in retirement, Eisenhower would say to a sympathetic biographer that sending Federal Troops into Little Rock was the most agonising decision he had ever had to make, with the exception of his decision to go ahead with the D-Day Invasion in World War II. He said he had felt sad, but firm in his belief (whatever his personal convictions) that it was his manifest duty to uphold the Constitution whatever the cost. Over this core precept of The Eisenhower Way, the president never hesitated.
1958: Calming the Storm; Making an Opportunity of the Sputnik Crisis by Founding NASA.
From the distance of sixty years, it is hard to understand how the Soviet launch of a very primitive satellite serving no practical purpose could have stirred up so much fear in the American people. But Sputnik, which gave the Soviets great global prestige at the time, illustrated that soon the USSR—given its relative technological prowess—would master the science to be able to launch a missile with a nuclear payload aboard. After Sputnik, the shocking notion that the US might well be losing the Cold War to the feared and hated Russians struck America like a thunderbolt.
Eisenhower, knowing that this fear was entirely ungrounded, tried to calm the country, as he was concerned the wasteful military arms race between the two great powers would be jumpstarted amidst the hysteria. But for once, Ike’s famed calm, reassuring manner did not do the trick. Despite correctly proclaiming that, “overall the military strength of the free world is decidedly greater than the Communist countries,” Sputnik-mania gripped America.
The Democrats, sensing political blood at last, opened hearings on the ‘Missile Gap’ in the Senate, spearheaded by the young, ambitious, John F. Kennedy. Eisenhower knew what was coming; he feared not a ‘Missile Gap,’ but a Missile Race, that the Armed Forces Chiefs and the Democrats would use the Sputnik crisis to demand ruinous military spending in order to compete with the Soviets over an entirely manufactured problem. In the end, Eisenhower decided he himself would not let a good crisis go to waste; instead he skilfully used the Sputnik hysteria to push for the foundation of NASA, a civilian agency directed to use American technology in the service of space exploration.
In fostering American technological prowess through the creation of NASA, Eisenhower—in line with the construction of the Interstate Highway System and the St. Lawrence Seaway—was not averse to establishing large government projects that served the nation’s interests. At the same time, the president fervently hoped that his actions in creating NASA in October 1958 would quell the Sputnik hysteria, enabling him to hold the line on defence spending, balancing the budget, and limiting the militarisation of American society.
Due to both Eisenhower’s NASA initiative and, mimicking Sputnik, the fact that the US soon launched its own satellite into space, the hysteria centred on the incorrect fear that the US had somehow fallen behind the USSR in terms of technological prowess began to abate. The president, through his preternaturally steady demeanour, calm use of actual, objective facts, and championing the NASA initiative, had turned the tide. However, after Sputnik, keeping control of defence spending became an ever-harder occupational hazard not just for Eisenhower, but for all the American presidents to come.
1959: In the nuclear age, Détente must be the default US position in dealing with other Great Powers; Khrushchev comes to visit and The Spirit of Camp David.
Even though he was the last American president to be born in the Nineteenth Century, Eisenhower had a remarkably modern take on how the dawning nuclear age would affect the practice of diplomacy.
Despite the fact that he himself—over both the Korean armistice and the Quemoy and Matsu crisis—was not above bluffing about the use of nuclear weapons, his private position was starkly bleak about them. Once, when attending a White House meeting as to how the dollar could be re-established in the US following a Soviet nuclear strike, the president grimly joked, “Boys, stop the meeting. If we undergo a nuclear attack, we won’t be talking about re-establishing the dollar. We will be grubbing for worms.”
As far back as the end of World War II, Eisenhower—almost uniquely—had grave concerns about the American use of the Atomic Bomb to end the war with Japan. Later he wrote, “First, the Japanese were about to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.” In unleashing the genie of the nuclear age, it is clear that Eisenhower had great fears it could be controlled.
This trepidation about the vast power of nuclear weapons was matched by the high regard Eisenhower held the Soviet allies in for their central role in defeating Hitler’s Germany. During the final stages of the war, when pressed by Churchill to make a dash to capture totemic Berlin ahead of the Russians, Ike demurred, manoeuvring British and American armies southwards, away from the German capital.
Eisenhower believed that, having suffered ghastly losses of around 20 million dead, the Soviets deserved the honour of taking the Nazi lair. At the same time, and correctly, Ike was aware that taking the German capital would be a bloodbath, likely costing 100,000 further lives. The Russians, in particular his friend Marshall Zhukov (who was to personally take Berlin himself) never forgot Eisenhower’s sensitive championing of their cause in the arena of allied diplomacy. This wartime camaraderie was a card the American president was now to play in his fervent efforts to see that the Cold War never turned hot.
US-Soviet tensions had risen following the Sputnik hysteria, and Ike was determined to test the proposition that the Cold War could be thawed. With Stalin’s death, March 5, 1953, there was a perceived chance for a rapprochement with the Soviets. Dramatically, the president invited new (and relatively moderate) Soviet paramount leader Nikita Khrushchev to visit both him and the United States. From his wartime experience, Eisenhower knew the value of personal diplomacy, that it was harder to hate a man theoretically once you had gotten to know him personally, and that from there differing national interests could more calmly be discussed and agreements reached.
And indeed, as Eisenhower and the premier talked at the presidential retreat Camp David (named for the president’s grandson), a thaw in tensions ensued. The USSR and the US agreed to attend a Peace Summit in Paris, where they were scheduled for the first time to talk about placing limits on nuclear weapons production. At the same time, Khrushchev agreed to rescind a Soviet ultimatum regarding embattled Berlin, significantly lowering Cold War tensions. Secretly, the Soviet leader was also looking for a peace dividend; following Khrushchev’s American trip he was able to cut 1 million men from the Soviet armed forces in the interests of bolstering his economy.
What was then called ‘The Spirit of Camp David’ amounted to the first American effort at détente with the Soviets, a recognition that given the horrors of nuclear war, same effort at nuclear limitation was absolutely imperative. Even beyond this, as was proven true over the Berlin crisis, it was hoped that differing national interests could be better aligned in the service of a more stable world. Poignantly, it took a soldier who knew the horrendous cost of war to begin the search for a superpower peace.
1960: Integrity is Everything; The U2 Crisis and the Tragedy of the Paris Peace Summit.
Building on ‘The Spirit of Camp David,’ the Soviet-American May 1960 summit was premised on the startlingly ambitious premise that the Cold War itself could at last be brought to an end. However, tragically, it was not to be; the abject failure of Paris amounted to the great ‘What If’ of the Eisenhower presidency, the lost chance that saw the Cold War freeze up again, this time to unprecedentedly dangerous levels during the Kennedy administration.
Ironically, its failure was a direct result of the U2 spy plane crisis, the one time where Eisenhower’s rightly-famed reputation for credibility let him down. This aberration occurred at the worst possible moment, with the chance for peace beguilingly within reach. This greatest failure of the Eisenhower presidency does not negate all the man had done throughout his long career of service in making personal credibility a central tenet of ‘The Eisenhower Way.’ Rather, this rare lapse merely confirms its absolutely central importance.
In line with his overall ‘Hidden Hand’ approach, the Eisenhower administration had long had a proclivity for an extensive use of espionage and covert action (spearheaded by the CIA) to further American national interests. This was both because spying was relatively cheap (certainly compared with military arms) and allowed for bold strategic actions to be taken short of war. In 1954 in Iran, CIA-sponsored riots had put the pro-American Shah back on his throne. During the Eisenhower era, the CIA also colluded in the overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala, and possibly the Lumumba regime in the Congo.
Ahead of the summit meeting, Eisenhower—as he had shown during the Sputnik crisis—(rightly) did not believe that the USSR was ahead of America in missile technology; however, it was also certainly true that he could negotiate in Paris with more confidence if he knew this to be a fact for certain. Assured that the U2 spy planes were too high-tech to ever be caught, the president authorised CIA Chief Allen Dulles to send them over the USSR to determine the precise state of the Soviet missile programme. The overflights were to stop May 1, 1960, just ahead of the summit. On the last possible day, at the worst possible moment, the U2 of American Captain Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Soviet airspace.
Assuming the pilot was dead (given that the U2 flew at very high altitudes), the president approved a CIA cover story designed to make this potentially very large embarrassment go away, falsely saying a weather plane had strayed into Soviet airspace from Turkey. However, by May 5th, Khrushchev charged a spy plane had been shot down over the USSR. But even here, he gave Eisenhower diplomatic cover, blaming Pentagon warmongers for attempting to sabotage the summit, but not Eisenhower, his partner in peace. Crucially, and what amounts to the single biggest mistake of his presidency, Eisenhower doggedly stuck with the false cover story.
Now the Soviet diplomatic trap snapped shut. Khrushchev released photos of the downed U2 as well as announcing that Powers had ben captured alive, severely compromising American credibility in general and Eisenhower’s in particular. The president had long felt his personal integrity, laboriously built over decades of service, was his greatest diplomatic asset; disdaining any further efforts to blame either underlings or other American institutions (the CIA suggested at this key juncture the president forcefully blame itself for the debacle, in an effort to rescue the summit), President Eisenhower at last admitted the U2 fiasco was entirely his fault. It was a noble thing to do, and spoke to the president’s personal fineness as a man. But it was also too late.
Faced with Eisenhower’s frank admission of culpability, Khrushchev rescinded his earlier invitation—following on from his own successful trip to the US—for Eisenhower to visit the USSR. With the diplomatic ‘Spirit of Camp David’ dead in the water after the U2 incident, the Paris Peace Summit became the next casualty. As Khrushchev later frankly admitted in his memoirs, “From the time Gary Powers was shot down, I was never in full control” of the Soviet negotiating posture. Soviet hard-liners used the U2 crisis to force a far more bellicose line on the Soviet premier.
Everything Eisenhower had epitomised: prudence, patience, strategic skill, and credibility had eluded him and at the worst possible moment. At the summit in Paris, Eisenhower—in an effort to stop the public relations disaster from continuing--refused to apologise for the United States to Khrushchev for the U2 flights; the Soviet premier, under great pressure from his own hawks, stalked out of the meeting. The summit came to an inglorious end, and with it, the first real chance for détente between the two Great Powers of the Cold War. It was a terrible end to Eisenhower’s highly successful presidency. However, the tragedy of the Paris Peace Summit does not refute ‘The Eisenhower Way.’ To the contrary, it confirms it. The one basic time the president turned away from his own credo, the results were calamitous.
1961:Saving America From Itself; The Prescience of Eisenhower’s Farewell Address and the Dangers of the Military-Industrial Complex.
Following the razor-thin victory of his youthful critic, John F. Kennedy, in the 1960 presidential election, Eisenhower was leaving office a disappointed man. Kennedy had risen to prominence in the Senate, castigating the United States for ignoring a missile gap that Ike knew to not exist. He complained to friends that all his work was about to be undone; that given this he should have spent the 1950s ‘having fun,’ instead of steering America through the dangerous early days of the Cold War.
Yet Eisenhower still had something of the greatest importance to say to his people; he urgently wanted to warn them of the dangers of over-militarising American society. As he had wryly observed to close friends during his term of office, ‘God help the nation when it has a president who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do.’
Even when he first ran for president in 1952, Eisenhower had been critical of what he saw as the excessive military spending of the Truman administration; it was The Hero of Normandy who had campaigned on a platform of restrained military expenditure and the need for balanced budgets. As he put it during his run for the White House, ‘Not one (defence) dollar should be spent without full value received.’ As far back as his 1952 campaign platform, Eisenhower had included a harsh critique of unaccountable military expenditures as a danger to the stability and long-term growth of the American economy. For Eisenhower, economic strength really was the lodestar of overall national power.
Given his status as the greatest of war heroes, and the intimate knowledge of the armed forces his biography had given him, uniquely the president saw military spending as part of a larger whole. For him, defence expenditures merely amounted to a sub-set in overall federal spending and was simply a necessary evil in American life, one that must be watched over with the greatest care.
Early on in his first term, Eisenhower had already tried to alert to the American people about the dangers of excessive military spending. In his ‘Cross of Iron’ speech of April 16, 1953—following on from the unexpected death of Stalin—in the starkest terms, Eisenhower had likened arms spending to stealing from the people. Highlighting the backbreaking cost of continued tensions with the USSR, Eisenhower noted that America faced not only strategic perils such as the Korean War, but an ongoing arms race that, if unchecked, could come to corrode American life itself.
As the president passionately explained, ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not about spending alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities…This is not a life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of the threat of war, it is humanity hanging by a cross of iron.’
In invoking the earlier ‘Cross of Gold’ speech of populist William Jennings Bryan, Eisenhower had attempted to make Americans see that the basic trade-offs involved in excessive military spending were robbing the country of the good life it had struggled for so valiantly in World War II. Eisenhower wanted to avoid ‘an unbearable security burden leading to economic disaster.’ He was listened to respectfully, but the speech did not move the needle of public opinion.
His basic insight that, ‘We must achieve both security and solvency. In fact, the foundation of military strength is economic strength,’ was overshadowed by a rise in Cold War tensions as his second term came to an end. Trying to hold the line, Eisenhower had admonished Dulles, ‘Our defence depends on our fiscal system.’ By the end of the 1950s, this common-sense advice was increasingly falling on deaf ears as the Cold War heated up.
Throughout his presidency, Eisenhower would engage in a long, twilight struggle against fanatical Cold War hawks who wanted to protect America to the point that they came to fiscally and socially ruin the country they were striving so hard to defend. Bookending the ‘Cross of Iron’ speech, in the last minutes of his presidency, Eisenhower was determined to spread his prophetic warning once again. As he so presciently put it, ‘The problem in defence is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.’
Working with his brother Milton and chief speechwriter, Malcolm Moos, Eisenhower’s ‘Farewell Address’ was painstaking constructed; in the end the speech went through fully 21 drafts. In what was to be his final word, his last public speech to the nation as president, Eisenhower went before the cameras, January 17, 1961, just days before John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the country’s 35thpresident.
If the ‘Cross of Iron’ speech had been designed to point out the fiscal perils of excessive defence spending, illuminating the real choices that had to be made between serving America’s economic and social well-being and its military defence, in the Farewell Address, the president made an even starker argument. Without meaning to, the Military-Industrial complex could come to skew American decision-making toward policies that involved its perpetuation, leading to endless American wars, and all the foreign and domestic suffering that such a stance would bring about.
As the president warned, ‘the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience…We recognise the imperative need for its development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications…In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous increase in misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.’
Echoing America’s Founders, Eisenhower, using the bully pulpit of the presidency as he had never done before, pointed out that any vastly powerful interest group like the Military-Industrial complex must be suspiciously and constantly monitored, as it could lead to Caesarism, penury, or both. Eisenhower wanted to defend the United States from the Russian military but also the extreme, counter-veiling American military spending that could place the Republic itself in jeopardy.
As an Ethical Realist, the president understood the value of the ancient Greek virtue of balance. Aware from his great love of history that Republics traditionally have committed political suicide, Eisenhower fretted that an overly militaristic America may be headed down this old, doleful road. Throughout his presidency, Eisenhower deeply worried about the nation becoming a garrison state. The fact that a famous general should have been so intellectually suspicious of security institutions—their practices and motives—is a tribute to Eisenhower’s genius as a man. One last time, America’s greatest Twentieth Century military hero answered the call to duty, warning that it was an over-emphasis on his lifelong profession that could lead to the undoing of the country he had served all his adult life.
Given all that has happened since: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, surely Eisenhower’s Farewell Address amounts to some of the best political risk analysis ever tendered. As the eminent historian John Lewis Gaddis rightfully stresses, the speech amounted to ‘the most memorable farewell address since Washington’s.’ It was Eisenhower’s gift to the nation, the summation of all that he had learned, reminding America that what made it admirable about the country is not its foreign conquests, but what it is.
Conclusion: The Eisenhower Way and Radical Centrism in the Twenty-First Century.
The Eisenhower Way
1) Securing a bipartisan consensus with the Democrats over foreign policy by pursuing the Containment Doctrine of primarily political competition with other Great Power Rivals.
2) In the nuclear age, recognising the imperative of pursuing a policy of limited war, when combat becomes necessary.
3) Pursuing an limited foreign policy, where it is accepted that it is the peoples of any specific country that—despite great American power—largely determine their own existence.
4) Pursuing a limited foreign policy in terms of anti-interventionism, where the US engaging in war is the last resort, and not the first.
5) Advocating a third way for the American government; where government is neither the saviour nor the enemy.
6) Endorsing the Primacy of Constitutionalism, where enforcing America’s sacred document takes primacy over twisting it to suit selfish partisan political needs.
7) Always stressing fact-based solutions to specific crises, relying on America and its educated citizenry to clearly and calmly assess the world we actually live in.
8) Pursuing a foreign policy where Great Power détente is America’s first impulse, not its last.
9) Seeing to it that our leaders are about Integrity first and last, as it is everything in terms of statecraft and exporting soft power throughout the world.
10) Guarding against the military-industrial complex, always balancing America’s internal economic and social needs against the imperative for having a strong defence, knowing that an over-reliance on the military can lead to Caesarism, penury, or both.
Any casual observer, perfunctorily viewing the list of attributes (mined from the great events of his presidency) that comprise the Eisenhower Way, can readily see how valuable the precepts are, and how much has been lost. To be a radical centrist—as Eisenhower certainly was—is to disdain the easy policy solutions of both the right and left, who have taken both major parties hostage. At present, despite the fact that The Eisenhower way would be enthusiastically accepted by the vast majority of Americans, neither political party remotely espouses Ike’s long-forgotten views. But resigned despair must not and cannot be the response to this beguiling paradox.
Rather, echoing the general’s optimistic, confident, can-do style, American democratic renewal is called for, a remaking of the American middle which embraces the notion of America as a Great Power, one that remains the envy of much of the world, but also sees an America that must live within the limits of today’s world. Strikingly, Eisenhower presided over the zenith of American power in the 1950s; but even then he was perpetually aware of the limits of that colossal strength. The Eisenhower Way’s balanced view: internationalist, sovereigntist, outward-looking but continually aware of both American limits and the vital trade-offs involved in balancing the outward defence of American interests with domestic and social goods, must be the once and future foreign policy of American centrism.
Domestically too, The Eisenhower Way stands in stark contrast to the fiscal profligacy of both the major parties of today, where the Democrats run screaming from the room at the mere mention of entitlement reform (or over any limits on their spending for that matter), just as Republicans never met a tax cut they didn’t like, whatever the disastrous consequences for the federal budget. Most Americans sharply disagree with both childish ideologies, which is a major reason that Congress today is among the nation’s least respected national institutions.
Instead, it is time for The Return of the Grown-Ups, of The Eisenhower Way’s sensible emphasis on government as neither villain nor saviour. President Eisenhower was surely right; the government must once again learn to live within its means, to balance the federal budget, if America’s long-term domestic tranquillity is to be safeguarded for our children, and our children’s children. However, when government spending--such as on infrastructure as Eisenhower himself promoted with the Interstate Highway Act and the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway—is necessary, there are times government alone can advance national economic and social goals. For a long time now, neither party has been remotely sensible about the role of government in American life. The Eisenhower way is necessary, more than ever.
Finally, the country’s weary eyes yearn for leaders who put the interests of the Constitution and the people first, and partisan selfish interests second. Whether it is Clinton supporters who refuse to acknowledge that there is something terribly wrong with opposition research generated by one presidential candidate being used to investigate the other presidential candidate (imagine if Richard Nixon had done this) or Trump partisans who think there is nothing wrong with the president’s proud lack of understanding of the norms of American constitutional life, the time has come for all people of goodwill to clean the Augean stables. The Eisenhower Way, with its emphasis on personal integrity and the primacy of Constitutionalism, is just the corrective the ailing American body politic needs.
The time for waiting for either major party to heed the Eisenhower Way is long gone; a new, third party based around the radical centre inhabited by the majority of Americans and held together by adherence to the enduring principles of the Eisenhower Way, must be created from scratch. The road ahead will be long, and the frustrations many. But, a majority radical centrist party, armed with sensible, successful precepts of The Eisenhower Way, cannot but triumph. As Ike knew better than anyone, never bet against the decency and common sense of the American people.